A principal (e.g., the US government) contracts with a researcher with unknown costs (e.g., a vaccine developer) to conduct a costly experiment. This contracting problem has a novel feature that captures the difference between the form of an experiment and the strength of its results: researchers face a problem of information design rather than optimal effort. Using a novel comparative static for Bayesian persuasion settings, I characterize the optimal contract and show how experimentation is distorted by the need to screen researchers. Moreover, I show that there is no loss from contracting on the experiment’s result rather than the experiment itself.

中文翻译：

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为异构研究人员设计激励措施

委托人（例如，美国政府）与成本未知的研究人员（例如，疫苗开发商）签订合同，以进行昂贵的实验。这个契约问题有一个新颖的特征，它捕捉到了实验形式和结果强度之间的差异：研究人员面临的问题是信息设计问题，而不是最佳努力问题。使用贝叶斯说服设置的一种新颖的比较静态，我描述了最佳合同，并展示了实验如何因筛选研究人员的需要而被扭曲。此外，我表明，收缩实验结果而不是实验本身并没有损失。